born just recently, a child who looks just like you. Where once you embraced four, four children born of adultery, calling them yours, then rejecting and disowning them, now the solemn sages teach us this: whatever a mother’s mind imagines with great intensity while the work of procreation is underway, secretly imprints its certain and indelible marks. In some inexplicable fashion, these are gathered into the very seed; once they are received deep within and grow together with the child, the newborn reflects that image planted by the mother's mind. When you were many thousands of miles away and your wife bore those other four, she felt entirely safe from you, and so she bore children unlike you. But this one child, consider this, reflects your very likeness because, when the mother conceived him, she was thinking of you most anxiously; her mind was filled with you as she lived in fearful dread that you, Sabinus, might inconveniently arrive like the "wolf in the fable" in the midst of her indiscretion.

So great is the power of the imagination in pregnant women that whatever they conceive in their minds is easily imprinted upon the developing fetus. Experience has proven this to be true; for instance, when the Emperor Charles V arrived in Belgium from Spain with a heavily armed fleet, he traveled through those lands accompanied by a vast retinue of nobles. Belgian women who were pregnant at the time looked upon these Spaniards and subsequently gave birth to infants with dark, curly hair and black eyebrows. This occurred not only among common women but even to matrons of proven virtue and incorruptible modesty.

Furthermore, not long ago, a certain scoundrel was traveling from town to town exhibiting an infant with an unusually large head. When a pregnant woman saw this child’s likeness, she gave birth to a boy with an enormously oversized head. For this reason, the medical author Soranus records that the tyrant Dionysius, being physically deformed himself and unwilling to father such children, placed beautiful statues of youths before his wife during intercourse.

Indeed, the books of the philosophers are full of evidence that the imagination possesses great power at the moment of conception. Because of this, they advise that elegant and beautiful images should be kept near the bed. Ambroise Paré, discussing this very topic, wrote that Queen Persina of Ethiopia gave birth to a white daughter despite her husband also being Ethiopian, because she frequently gazed upon an image of the beautiful Andromeda hanging in her bedchamber. Conversely, women should avoid looking at images of Ethiopians, as happened to a matron mentioned by Hippocrates; though her husband was white, she conceived a black son after viewing such an image.

Avicenna further confirms this, attributing this power of imagination even to brute animals. He recounts a story of a hen that, upon seeing and fearing a kite, hatched chicks from her eggs that had the heads of kites. We may further strengthen this opinion with another example.